Upper Trigram
艮 Gèn
Mountain — Stillness
Lower Trigram
坎 Kǎn
Water — Abysmal
Classical Texts
The Judgment
The student seeks the teacher, not the other way around. Ask once and receive an answer. Ask repeatedly out of anxiety and you'll get nothing—that's not inquiry, it's neediness. Success comes through staying the course.
The Lines
Line 1
Discipline awakens the fool—but only enough to start. Remove the fetters once the lesson takes hold. Continuing to punish after understanding arrives creates resentment, not growth.
Line 2
You can work with fools if you're patient. You can work with the inexperienced if you don't condescend. The capable child can run the household—competence isn't about age.
Line 3
Don't pursue someone who abandons themselves at the sight of wealth or status. When a person loses their center that easily, nothing good can come from the connection.
Line 4
Isolated in fantasy, cut off from reality—this is the most hopeless form of ignorance. The cure requires contact with the actual world, not more thinking.
Line 5
Childlike openness brings good fortune. The key word is childlike, not childish. No arrogance, genuine curiosity, willingness to not-know. This is the right attitude.
Line 6
Sometimes a fool must be stopped, not taught. But the punishment should prevent future harm, not avenge past wrongs. Defense, not attack.
Yilin: Forest of Changes
From Jiao Yanshou's Forest of Changes (焦氏易林) — the verse for Hexagram 4 in its unchanging form. A Han dynasty collection of four-character verses interpreting every hexagram transformation.
何草不黃，至未盡玄。室家分離，悲愁於心。
What grass is not yellowed? Reaching its end, all turns dark. House and home are parted; grief and sorrow fill the heart.
Read full commentary ↓
A spring beneath the mountain returns to the mountain — folly encountering itself. The verse opens by quoting the Shijing soldiers' lament 'He Cao Bu Huang': 'What grass is not yellowed?' — an image of universal exhaustion under endless campaigning. But the withering has not yet reached its darkest extreme. Families are torn apart, grief filling the heart. When the source hexagram meets its own reflection, there is no transformation, only intensification: the naivety that might have been educated instead compounds into deeper confusion. Separation from home and kin is the cruelest form of bewilderment — not ignorance of facts, but loss of the relationships that give knowledge its meaning.
中文注释
山下出泉，蒙之自遇。開篇引《詩經·小雅·何草不黃》：「何草不黃？何日不行？」——征夫之歌，萬物枯黃，疲憊至極。然「至未盡玄」，衰敗尚未至最深之暗。室家分離，悲愁入心。蒙遇蒙，無變化之卦，蒙昧不得開啟而自我加深。離散骨肉乃最深之迷惘——非不知事理，乃失去賦予知識以意義之人倫紐帶。草雖黃而未盡枯，暗示一線轉機，然此刻唯有深切之哀傷。
Related Hexagrams
Same upper trigram: Mountain (艮)
Same lower trigram: Water (坎)